Q's for those who follow a strict budget!!

Due to a change in our circumstances my hubby and I are wanting to tighten our budget. We have always had a rough budget for shopping, petrol and bills but tings like gifts and clothes we just buy as we need.

I'm now wanting to include this in our weekly budget but am struggling with amounts.

So to those who follow a strict budget, what catagories does your budget include and if you don't mind sharing how much do you budget for family clothes and gifts etc.

We make or grow alot of our gifts. ;-)
Also have alot of kids clothes swap party with friends - kids grow too quickly and most (including myself) have clothes still brand new with tags!!
Also Op shops are great for kids clothes - hubby us great at finding brand names!
For more ideas check out Simple Savings on FB and web - www.simplesavings.com.au

first i pay bills and make sure there's going to be enough left for the next week's automatic direct debit bills. i hate being paid fortnightly. then:

shopping (groceries!)
petrol
any special expenses that week- this includes rare bills such as yearly memberships or if i need to buy another work uniform or buy phone credit or whatever
anything i'm saving up for- entry into an event,for instance
spending

couple of tips i've found useful, may not work for you but worth telling. use excel. you can make columns and tables and have categories of spending and use it to calculate totals. and then put in how much you got paid and figure out how much will be left after certain things have been taken out. i LOVE excel.
use envelopes if you're like me and go crazy if it's all on a piece of plastic. go withdraw your pay and put it in envelopes. $100 for shopping, $50 for petrol, etc, with the amounts you've chosen of course. label them all including how much is in there. seal them if you're still tempted, and only open them when you get to the checkout.

I include every conceivable expense in our budget and set an amount for things like gifts, entertainment, fuel, etc. So for example, if a gift is more than that amount it's tough luck, find a cheaper gift. At the moment we are on a very tight budget due to my lack of work so even meals are planned and budgeted for. We keep the money in our offset account to ensure our mortgage gets the benefit of the money sitting there but I track it how much has been "saved up" or "spent" for each expense in a separate linked spreadsheet to my budget spreadsheet. It is working really well at the moment.

The total of these expenses (I use a monthly average for things like rego) is transferred into our 'bill paying' account to accumulate until the bills arrive.

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Finally, whatever is left over from our salaries after deducting our everyday and bill paying expenses is transferred into our high interest savings account.

So yep, I budget for EVERYTHING: We still go out and do stuff spontaneously (and dip into our savings), but I feel more comfortable knowing that I have our finances under control at all times. I'm a freak

I hope that helps!

P.S. We don't have any credit card debt, either. We buy everything on our everyday expenses list using the credit card to accumulate frequent flyers, then we pay the credit card off in full each week. At the end of the year ... Woohoo! Free holiday!